[Lazarus] Lazarus shortcuts conflict with windows shortcuts

[Reinier Olislagers]

On 15-8-2012 13:39, Jürgen Hestermann wrote:
> Am 2012-08-15 12:19, schrieb Reinier Olislagers:
>> So you removed your settings directory and were surprised your
> settings were gone???
> 
> 1.) I thought my settings were stored in
> "D:\Programme\lazarus\environmentoptions.xml". "C:\Dokumente und
> Einstellungen\<username>\Lokale Einstellungen\Anwendungsdaten" should
> not be used for such settings at all. Windows has "C:\Dokumente und
> Einstellungen\<username>\Anwendungsdaten" for this but I changed this to
> the installation directory long ago.
"Changed this"? How? Using --primary-config-path then?

> 2.) I *had* to delete it because I did not know any other way to get rid
> of the error message (I think it was something about lazbase not found
> or so). It took me even a while to find out that Lazarus has stored
> things in this directory too.
Or you could have asked on the ML or forum. IIRC, there were some
transition issues with old projects having LCLbase or something
dependencies.

>> Saving settings in c:\documents and settings\<username>\... somewhere
> is the standard location for Windows (XP?) settings files, so it wasn't
> surprising to me that they were stored there.
> 
> See above.
> 1.) "Somewhere" should have been "C:\Dokumente und
> Einstellungen\<username>\Anwendungsdaten" and not "C:\Dokumente und
> Einstellungen\<username>\Lokale Einstellungen\Anwendungsdaten" (that's
> for scratch data only and is not save within our roaming profile at work
> for example).
Do you have some Microsoft documentation link for that? If that location
makes sense, I'd submit a patch so you (and the rest of us) don't get
bitten by this again...

> 2.) I changed Lazarus to not use this path (but it seems either this was
> skipped with some update or was ignored at all).
"Changed Lazarus".... how then? By patching the binary? I suppose you
changed the primary config path then in your shortcuts as that seems the
only sane thing to do...

I suppose that running the installer again will create shortcuts...
don't know if it overwrites existing ones.
Do you think the installer shouldn't overwrite existing shortcuts? What
if you change the install directory in your new installation?

>> Apart from that, perhaps the release notes mentioned (see e.g.
> http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Category:Release_Notes) you had to
> change some settings?
> 
> I install snapshots very frequently. I don't look into any release notes
> for each setup. It seems this was a fault and I need to stay with a
> working installation as long as possible. So using snapshots is not
> wise. I will not do this again (never change a running system, though
> sometimes it was not running in parts).
Hmm yes. You did read the warning on the snapshots page, did you?

To counter this, what I do is have a "stable" version installed, which I
only rarely update.
Next to that one, I have separate versions (e.g. trunk Lazarus with FPC
2.6.1, trunk Lazarus with FPC 2.7.1, trunk Lazarus with FPC 2.7.1 x64)
using different primary-config-paths (that *don't* point to the
installation directories - I'd like to be able to wipe the Lazarus dirs
and start again)

> But that's totaly confusing for users if they are asked to overwrite
> this. If it's a fallback then it should be overwritten silently in the
> same way that all other files are overwritten too. I also mentioned that
> I configured Lazarus to save my settings in the installation direcory
> and not in "Dokumente und Einstellungen" so this message made me think
> that it will overwrite my settings. But as I now know, this was not the
> case. I consider this confusing.
Well, either your settings are in your Lazarus dir (in which case
confirmation is very handy) or they are not. Apparently now you're
saying they're not.
Regardless, a user can customize that fallback environmentoptions.xml
and distribute it. That's why there's an overwrite question.
Presumably, an installer could check to see what release the existing
Lazarus install was, if the previous environmentoptions.xml was
unchanged with regard to the file distributed with that install etc...
but that seems like a lot of work to me.

>> Having multiple files does make it much easier to replace some of them
>> (e.g. editoroptions). As discussed in this and other threads, that makes
>> it useful for institutional use where some files can be replaced/updated
>> by centrally standardized files.
> 
> But it makes it harder to understand for the user and leads to such
> confusions
There's always tradeoffs. Do you really think having one humongous XML
file would clarify things? You'd still need to know about the XML schema
etc. anyway if you want to make meaningful changes.


>> If you think these files are confusing and don't want have anything to
>> do with them, why is the number of files a problem? They're all stuck in
>> the config directory anyway...
> 
> Yes, but I was told that I need to configure my shortcut settings and
> now need to copy all these settings around to all my machines where I
> use Lazarus. A real pain.
Well... perhaps there is a single XML file that has these shortcuts
which you can just copy, instead of copying everything which messes up
your paths etc. that differ per machine. Hey, and advantage of multiple
config files ;)
I don't know though, haven't looked.

>> Finally, you can edit your configs via Tools/Options... so why worry
>> about the amount of files etc?
> 
> Because I don't want to do that over and over again on multiple
> installations and I also want to have a backup of my settings which I
> can reinstall (either after data loss or on other machines).
That makes sense.